Amazon Appstore’s Free App of the Day for Sept. 30, 2011: SportsCaster Pro

by knot move

Amazon.com has promised to make a paid app free every day in the Amazon Appstore, and today’s app is SportCaster: Pro (Sports, Twitter).

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There’s no SportCaster: Pro (Sports, Twitter) in the Android Market. There is a free SportCaster (Sports, Twitter) app in the Market, however, and the Pro version normally priced at $4.99 in the Amazon Appstore. As we noted previously, prices sometimes differ between the two stores.

SportCaster: Pro (Sports, Twitter) is described as follows:

You’re not just a sports fan–you’re a sports fanatic. You want the latest news and scuttlebutt on all your favorite teams, and you want it now, as soon as it breaks. You want SportCaster Pro for Android.

Tweet Tweet

Getting your sports news and information from the paper (what’s that?), electronic media (mainstream and slow), or the Web (cluttered and behind) is so 2009. These days, the action is on Twitter, where the writers, players, and coaches communicate directly with the fans and everyone can join in the conversation.

“Hey, Did You Hear?”

SportCaster Pro is an app that connects you directly with this brave new world, bringing you live college and pro sports with a social voice. Got a favorite NFL team? The app lets you flag the team (or teams, if you divide your loyalties) and then generates a Twitter feed with everything related to that team. This includes journalists, bloggers, fans, and those connected directly to the team, all commenting before, during, and after games. Or you can limit the feed to specific hashtags that you enter.

You can also follow a general Twitter feed for the NFL, college football, or a particular college conference. There’s even a feed dedicated to tweets by the best fantasy sports experts. Never miss breaking news and be the first among your friends to know what’s going on.

Chime In

What could be better than this? How about being able to participate in the discussion without ever leaving the app? When you’ve got something to say, just hit Compose and share your insights with the world. Easily attach a photo or a video to your tweet. You can also tap on any tweet to reply, retweet, comment, or view the tweeter’s profile. Want to pass along news or analysis to your friends? Share a tweet via text message, e-mail, or social networking sites.

Scoreboard, Baby

Of course, SportCaster also features a week-by-week game schedule and brings you all the latest scores and stats, including game recaps, box scores, standings, and rankings. When you tap on a score, you call up a screen that contains this info, but it also has a conversation button so you can see what people are saying about the action in real time. It’s like watching the game with a group of very passionate, knowledgeable people–a social scoreboard, as it were. If you love sports and sports talk, once you go SportCaster, you’ll never go back.

Note: SportCaster Pro launches with support for both pro and college football. Future versions will include pro and college basketball, hockey, and baseball as those sports begin their upcoming seasons.

SportCaster (Sports, Twitter) [the free version] has a 4.3-star rating in the Android Market, and a 3.5-star rating in the Amazon Appstore.

Quite a few of the low ratings in the Amazon Appstore are due to the app being released with only coverage for NFL and NCAA football. However, the developers are quite clear that they will be adding more sports.

SportsCaster comes from the same folks who developed TweetCaster for Twitter, which explains the SportsCaster name and its social networking bent.

Those who are considering “buying” a Free Amazon Appstore app might want to consider what it means to developers.

Amazon.com opened up the Appstore despite a lawsuit by Apple, which has previously trademarked the term “App Store.” Microsoft has filed an appeal against that trademark, saying the term is too generic. Amazon.com has responded to the lawsuit in the same manner.